(b. 1996, Cape Town, South Africa)

Talia Ramkilawan is an artist and teacher living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. Ramkilawan’s work aims to address her own lived experience with South African Indian identity and culture. She uses wool to visualize the complexity of one’s relationship to her and her world. Talia's work serves as a personal exercise in both reckoning and healing; needling through her relationships with self, family, friends, lovers, queerness, South African Indian-ness, indenture, and a chain of social and historical complexities that follows.

Central to Talia Ramkilawan’s practice is rug hooking, a slow, accumulative process with which she creates her “tapestry adjacent” wall pieces. Her more recent preoccupations include pleasure, intimacy, vulnerability, and softness as expressed in everyday life.

Transformation does not require that we suffer or torture ourselves. It can happen in quiet moments of peace and stillness, too.

Each piece of wool and fabric is meticulously pulled through by hand and a crochet needle, leaving behind blisters. Her battle wounds are reflections of the work put in. The repetition is hard and allows a trance-like state of introspection.

Her work captures shameless acts of love, articulating the artistic reflections of erotica and tenderness that are entrenched in the mandate that is to be brown, queer and radical, and how we navigate pleasure. The playfulness of colour and texture powerfully collaborate to provoke this even further.

She immerses herself in this craft, creating visceral and honesty-filled experiences of comfort and community.

Ramkilawan tells stories of intimacy, leisure, and celebration through a collaboration of still life, portraiture, and moments through unique uses of material. Talia invites us to experience some of the ways she has accessed pleasure in her world, shamelessly and deserving.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023

Looking at the Same Moon, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with BKHZ, Cape Town, South Africa. 

2022

Pleasure Over Pain, WhatIfTheWorld, Cape Town, South Africa.

2021

Heart4Sale, BKHZ, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Oh, I’m Definitely a Dessert Person, WhatIfTheWorld, Cape Town, South Africa.

2020

Aren’t We Always Having Indian Dreams?, FNB Art Joburg Art Fair, with Gallery Lab, Johannesburg, South Africa.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025

OUT, The Smithsonian, Washington D.C., USA.

Home, Wolff Architects, Cape Town, South Africa.

At Their Feet, Lemkus Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

Inner Sanctum, Everard Read Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.

2024

Collect Art Fair, with Galerie Revel, London, UK.

2023

Matérialité, Galerie Revel, Paris, France.

Curatorial Voices, Strauss&Co, Cape Town, South Africa.

1-54 London, with by BKHZ, London, UK.

Investec Cape Town Art Fair Tomorrow’s/Today Section, with BKHZ, Cape Town, South Africa.

2022

If Not Now, Then When, BKHZ, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Exit26, Monti, Italy.

Spring Awakening, Southern Guild, Cape Town, South Africa.

Open Air, ArchivexNike, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Romance, Luca Evans, Cape Town, South Africa.

Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with WhatIfTheWorld, Cape Town, South Africa.

2021

40Under40, WhatIFTheWorldxKrone, Cape Town, South Africa.

Gather ye Rosebuds While ye May, BKHZ, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Also Known As Africa Art and Design Fair, with BKHZ, Paris, France.

154 Art Fair France, with Septieme Gallery, Paris, France.

2020

Liminality in Infinite Space, African Arts Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria.

Kernal, Mason’s Press, Cape Town, South Africa.

Pink’s Not Dead, The Fourth, Cape Town, South Africa.

The Medium is the Message, UNIT London, London, UK.

Farewell to Good Good Friends, SMITH, Cape Town, South Africa.

Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with SMITH, Cape Town, South Africa.

2019

Rendezvous II, SMITH, Cape Town, South Africa.

The Female Line, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

Emphatic Whispers, SMITH, Cape Town, South Africa.

FNB Art Joburg, with SMITH, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with SMITH, Cape Town, South Africa.

2018

Michaelis Graduate Exhibition, Cape Town, South Africa.

Heavenly Bodies Group Show, curated by Jade Cheyenne, 34 Kloof Street, Cape Town, South Africa.

2017

Mothers, Money, Manuscripts and Minutes, curated by Thuli Gamedze, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

2024

The Norval Sovereign Art Prize Finalist.

2023

Tomorrow’s/Today Prize, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with BKHZ, Cape Town, South Africa.